Random Thought: Unfortunate Names

Random Thought: My wife's gynecologist's last name is Biggerstaff. Seems borderline inappropriate, considering his field of practice...

Heading to Vegas, Baby!

"In Vegas, I got into a long argument with the man at the roulette wheel over what I considered to be an odd number." - Steven Wright

So I've been playing poker of some sort for ten years or so. I have spent exactly three minutes in a casino. My wife and I took a trip to Niagara Falls, and I walked into the Fallsview Casino, saw no signs for the poker room and walked out. She was with me, and has no interest whatsoever in poker, so I just left.

I play occasionally at the BestBet poker room in Jacksonville, Florida, but that isn't a casino. It's a poker warehouse. You can go in there most any weekend of the year and there'll be sixty or seventy tables of poker running, and a waitlist for most of the games. But the games there are very, very juicy.

A buddy of mine and I have made plans several times to attend a WPT or WSOP Circuit event at some South Florida or Memphis casinos, but every time we made preliminary plans, they ended up falling through.

So April marks me and my wife's fifteenth wedding anniversary. We decided we wanted to take a trip somewhere - without the kids. God bless my wife, she suggested Las Vegas.

Yeah Baby!!!

So we're planning to visit Las Vegas in April, courtesy of Uncle Sam giving me some of my own money back. We're planning to stay for five days.  As I stated before, my wife cares not one whit about poker, so it won't be the 18-hour-a-day grind that I would love, but I will be getting in a couple of hours of poker a day.

Mostly, we're going to see the sights, eat some good food, watch some good shows, visit the Hoover Dam and Grand Canyon, and just enjoy some time without three ankle-biters hanging from our legs.

I'm excited for the trip - I'll be booking as soon as my refund arrives. I'm thinking we'll stay at Bally's, because it is reasonably priced and next to the Paris and across the strip from the Bellagio. The view should be perfect.

And I get to play poker. In Vegas. I can't wait.

My YouTube Channel

So in the interest of uniting my online presence, I am going to try to start posting here when I add a video to my YouTube channel (found here.)  So here's my latest video in which I patch a hole in my wife's tire.

Windows 7, UEFI, and Boot Error 0xc0000225

Back in February, the motherboard failed on my laptop and took the hard drive with it. I sent it in for repair, and when it returned I immediately set about removing that crapware Windows 8 and replacing it with Windows 7 Pro.

For the next week, I must have installed Win7 half a dozen times. It would install successfully every time. I could download and apply all the updates. But eventually it would encounter a boot error. Something like this:

Boot Manager:
Windows failed to start. A recent hardware of software change might be the cause. To fix the problem:

1.Insert your Windows installation disc and restart the computer.
2.Choose your language settings, and then click "Next".
3.Click "Repair your computer."

If you do not have this disc, contact your system administrator or computer manufacturer for assistance.

Status: 0xc0000255

I searched the internet. I found a lot of information about rebuilding the boot record. Nothing worked. I tried converting the whole disk to an MBR disk. No joy.

Then I hit on the solution.

I converted the disk back to a GPT disk and performed a clean operation. This completely wiped the drive of all partition information. I ran the installer again, and let the installer create the necessary boot partitions. I defined my OS and Data partitions.

It turns out that when I was massaging the partitions that were on the disk when it came back from ASUS, I deleted one of the required partitions. For whatever reason, the OS would start successfully for a while without this partition, but eventually it would fail spectacularly.

So the solution seems to be:

1. Boot to your install disk.
2. At the language selection screen, press Shift+F10 to get a terminal.
3. Enter diskpart and press Enter.
4. list disks to display a list of the disks on the system. 
5. Select the appropriate disk drive with the sel disk command. (Ex.: sel disk 0)
6. Enter convert gpt and press Enter. (I assume if you want to use MBR that it would be fine, just use the convert mbr command.)
7. Enter clean and press Enter.
8. Reboot to the install disk and install as normal. The installer's partition manager will handle creating the necessary boot partitions.

So if you have this issue, there is a fair chance that you have gunked up the required partions.

Transfer your email from Thunderbird to Outlook 2013 using GMail in 10 easy(ish) steps.

For the last 12 years or so I have been using Mozilla's Thunderbird application as my email reader. I was also using either OpenOffice or LibreOffice as my office suite. My boss finally got a subscription to the Microsoft Developer's network, meaning that we had access to multiple licenses for Office 2013, which includes Outlook 2013. Since some of the documents I must work with don't format correctly if they are opened in OpenOffice or LibreOffice, I decided to install Office 2013. Coinciding with that, I had a motherboard failure in my work laptop and was presented with a new one. I figured it was as good a time as any to convert to Outlook 2013, since I had been experiencing random freezes with Thunderbird.

Imagine my shock to find that Microsoft had made it all but impossible to import mail from any other mail program -- even Outlook Express. (That right there, I say that right there, is what we call sarcasm, son.)

I did find some commercial applications that claimed to be able to facilitate the conversion, but I just couldn't bring myself to pay $50 for something I'm going to use for less than an hour, ever. So I did what all good geeks do - I saved that $50 by spending $500 worth of my time looking for a free solution.

I didn't find one.

Not to be deterred, I did some thinking. And I came up with a way to move my email over, for free. I would just use GMail.

Here's how it goes:

Step 1: Get a throwaway GMail address.

Step 2: Make sure that your new GMail account has IMAP enabled. Go here and follow the prompts.

Step 3: Configure your GMail account in Thunderbird. You can find those instructions Here. There is also a good discussion of the relationship between Thunderbird folders and GMail Labels.

Step 4: For each folder of archived mail you have in your main Thunderbird account, create an identical folder in the GMail account in Thunderbird.

Step 5: Open each main Thunderbird folder and copy all emails to the corresponding folder in the GMail account. Since the GMail account is set up to use IMAP, when you copy those emails in they get mirrored up to your GMail account. It even preserves the original send date. Be sure the synchronization is complete before proceeding to Step 6.

Step 6: Configure your GMail account in Outlook 2013 and do a send/receive to download all of your email from GMail.

Step 7: Configure your main email account in Outlook 2013 and create your folders.

Step 8: Copy over the messages from your GMail account folders to your main email folders in Outlook. 

Step 9: If you wish, you may remove your GMail account from Outlook and delete everything from your GMail account.

Step 10: Pour yourself a beer, buddy. You're done. For free.

Random Thought: Walgreens

Random Thought: Walgreens Refill Prescription by Scan in their Android application is awesome. Just ordered a refill without having to speak to a human being. My inner hermit is blissfully happy.

Bill Whittle - Afterburner: It's a Miracle!

I love Bill Whittle.  He makes so much sense, and takes the liberals to task with a calm rationality that just makes me smile.